Difficulty Discussion

Since there was no thread solely for discussing the difficulty, I decided to make one.

Talk about the progression and difficulty system and overall difficulty of Starbound here.

Official stuff:
The difficulty of each planet is rated as a number from 1 to 100
Planets with multiple players will be more difficult to balance out the advantages of co-op play

 

I hope they make the max difficulty planets VERY, VERY difficult. It's always surprising how good some players get at a game.

 

Those planets better be able to gut even high armored and/or skilled people like fish.

 

If they are so difficult I hope we get the gun this guy is using

 

In my opinion, it should begin to be very difficult at 80 so that noone ever runs out of challenges. At 98-100 bosses should be able to 1 to 2-hit you! Beating those top difficulties is supposed to be really hard work!

 

I agree with you, however, I think that the "Plot/Storyline" planets shouldn't include any that are too difficult for a moderate player to beat.

 

I think the "Threat Level" thing is a bit of a theoretical thing. It's easy to say "We want it (Threat level 100) to be hard for people wearing top tier armor" but it's another thing to make it hard for people using specific combinations of gear.

For example: Is it hard for people who have tons of defense stacked on themselves? If you have so much defense that even heavy hitting creatures do minimal damage...there's virtually no difficulty in that. Or if a planet has only melee creatures and you have a beastly ranged rifle. Or what about if we have items that give you HP if you stand near them. Are threat level 100 planets designed to make it difficult, then?

Basically...(And this is nothing against the devs, I want that to be clear.) If they say threat level 100 planets are going to be hard for players with high-tier armor, I expect them not to let a silly exploit/gimmicky strategy render that difficulty useless.

However, I'm masochistic as a gamer, so I'm not satisfied unless the difficulty is brutal enough. I respect the fact that not everyone is a hardcore player, and that "Hard" is subjective. I'd rather have it be too easy for me, than have it too hard for most.

 

Haha, first thing I thought of was the "meteorite trick" to beat the hardmode bosses in Terraria. I agree. If something is supposed to be hard...patch the bugs/glitches/exploits.

 

As long as progression is relatively smooth and everything scales nicely I don't care how difficult it gets. If monsters on say a level 100 planet can rip me to shreds with a particularly vigorous sneeze I'm fine with that as long as getting to that point prepared me for such an encounter. Granted getting progression balanced to such a point may not be the easiest thing as long as it is reasonable I'm okay with that. I hope there is no hardmode trigger though (I was never very fond of that in Terraria) and the difficult planets are completely optional for those daring enough to seek such a challenge. I like being able to take those at my own pace instead of the game forcing me into it.

 

I agree, how the trigger made it so crazy hard, it wasn't even funny.

 

So you're all hoping for difficulty to be based on stat scaling? That's the laziest, least fun means of difficulty possible. I hope very much for extreme difficulty, but if that's the method, I hope the game is extremely easy.

The game is supposed to be far more skill based than Terraria and I hope that gear does not simply scale up like was horribly done in that game. A skill based game should be about learning enemy patterns, exploiting their weaknesses, timing shots to hit openings, not "I better go grind enemies until I find some level 50 gear so I can kill these slime enemies which behave exactly like the ones at level 40 but have a higher defense stat".

With the way shields work (very temporary and requiring timing) and the way armor seems to work by only adding a couple of extra hits to your already small hit pool, I think, and again hope very much that patterns and timing is the type of difficulty it will have. There's no point in having harder planets if you statistically scale with them... It's fake difficulty.

 

Tiy stated in one of the interviews(I think thats where I read it) That it will be no walk in the park on the higher planets even for the top geared players.

 

100 level planets should be like fighting The Destroyer, Skeletron Prime, and The Twins at once in terraria.

 

It would be nice for mobs to scale a little, so that you can't just go back to a level 1 planet with 100 gear (in SP at least).

To expand on that point, I think that it could be beneficial if the difficulty increasing didn't solely increase the mob difficulty but increased spawn rates and stuff.

 

I agree with having some really quite challenging planets for end game. I don't want to reach end game and then just find that I can 1 or 2 hit just about anything and charge across the map spamming melee to kill all that gets in my way.

As Sokina said, balancing the game for all the possible gear/tactics/exploits that players use will be nigh on impossible though. They can crank up the enemy stats and attacks to kill you more quickly, but even then it would be relatively easy to exploit. The problem comes from the sandbox element, when you can build whatever you want there's nothing to just stop you building a little hole that you can fire out of, but enemies cannot get in. This then basically renders most enemies useless already, and im assuming that most mobs aren't going to magically float through blocks. I do hope that some enemies have the ability to destroy blocks though. If you don't want your base destroyed then you should just defend it better with proper walls etc.

 

I got Dark Souls because I heard how difficult and unforgiving is. I love a challenge even if I stand no chance against it. However, not everyone is like me so it is important to balance the difficult planets from the not so difficult planets. I would like to know how they plan on making these planets "difficult" just out of curiosity.

Gotta love that Hallow music.

Frost legion

 

this will be hard but you do find things easier ingame when you have the top stuff possible

 

Try not to triple post, you can easily put them all into one reply

 

The higher level planets better be good, because in terraria everyone was like "OMG its impossible to solo any of the new bosses!" when 1.1 came out, but soon there was, "ALL HARDMODE BOSSES SOLOED IN x : x x Minutes" I really hope that doesnt happen here where the game gets to easy its just boring...

 

Whatever you all say, i would like to be able to adjust difficulty.

Of course, i like a good challenge, but i like even more to reach and at least see what happens if i beat some of the hardest planets.
So i would play on the hardest difficulty i can pull, and if i can't manage that i would like to be able to decrease it. At least on single player.